August 25, 2026

1 Preferring one interpretation of a passage from Heraclitus to a literal translation of it (assuming such a thing is possible) has to do with preferring the enchanted over the disenchanted. Was Heraclitus’s value not bound up with his charm, with the charm, for instance, of the unknown?

But in this too there may be expressed in us an error «that now cannot be corrected»¹.

2 There is a relation between ingratitude and incompleteness; faced with a criticism, guidance, or a truth like this, whoever is ungrateful and incomplete, that is, whoever wants to uphold a position and perspective like this, the ungrateful and incomplete person falls silent.

When the criticism is right, the one criticized keeps silent. This shows how our faults, which have to develop (roots) as much as our virtues (branches), bear a relation to nothingness.

3 We have said that it is the whole that determines the point, and the point where the whole is reflected with the least interference. It should also be said here that the first and last pinnacle of our existence is the one the whole reaches least, and on that our freedom is based; and the direct effect the whole has on us, and where nature is most visible, is in the most superficial layers, in the stamping of the figure, which, as Jünger saw clearly, goes on molding that race through the ethnic layers. Hence not only Jesus has merit, but Saint Paul does too.

4 One must take lack into account in the influence of things, not only the light; good and evil do not apply there, unlike perhaps what Zarathustra thought, just as morality does not apply in the description of the sun or the earth.

5 Originality is the emptiest point of all, hence the aptness of the geometric point or of Leibniz’s monads; if creation has been left behind, what remains is the freedom granted by nothingness, the perfect without qualities, which is even less than perfection; in a world already created, the story of creation inevitably begins from 0, and it is the whole that determines the point…

6 That life is «will to power» does not mean it is unbridled will to power—though the fact that it is that too is evidence that it is will to power.

What marks second-order unbridled will to power can be seen in the fact that it makes «the crown burn even in victory»², that is: it favors only the individual and not necessarily what is singular in him.

7 When Goethe says that Schiller offers others advice, so that they not only criticize him but later use his advice without thanking him for it, what he is protecting there, and what is healthy in his observation, is what is singular in the person, not so much the individual.

There is no clear, complete separation between the individual and his singularity, since the whole affects the person from the stamping inward. But that is another matter; in Schiller, there is an excess of the particular in the universal, and therefore perhaps less than there should be of emphasizing «the universal in the particular.»

8 In the void and the nothingness of the first and last pinnacle of our existence, the freedom the whole has over the point is expressed without qualities.

9 Are the very limits of the natural numbers the limits of the prime numbers?; of course these limits have to be seen within their infinite nature, that is, what is not part of them, perhaps within the limits of every translation, within the limits of the relative.

Nietzsche proposes the same thing. Criticism of nature is relative; it demands giving each thing its place. Morality, or the criticism of actions, is absolute, although actions are overdetermined, that is, they have little undistributed force.